Whisper Hollow

January 12, 2015
Cander’s follow-up to 2013’s 11 Stories is inextricably rooted in West Virginia coal country—the rough locale that determines and intertwines her characters’ fates. The obligation-vs.-love plot is divided into two parts: the first half introduces two women, Myrthen, a beauty with an unsettling dark streak who devotes herself to God after her twin sister’s death, and Alta, a housewife with an artist’s soul. Cander closely tracks how Myrthen’s and Alta’s romantic decisions unknowingly complicate each other’s lives in the lead-up to a tragic incident that bisects the novel. Picking up their story 17 years later, Cander then homes in on Lidia, a young mother who meets good-witch Alta and bad-witch Myrthen. It reads like standard smalltown dramatic fare—that is, until a paranormal twist: Lidia’s son develops uncanny foresight. Cander’s exploration of these promising interpersonal dynamics is encumbered by cliché, inconsistencies of structure and character, and an awkwardly rigid chronological frame, but she admirably captures the lack of choice that men and women have in rural West Virginia. “It’s called a ‘mine’ for a reason,” one character states. “’Cause everybody’s working to support their own. I’ll be working to support mine.”

Starred review from January 1, 2015
Verra, West Virginia, is the setting of this sweeping novel, in which first- and second-generation immigrants with coal-stained hands and blackened lungs forge new lives for their growing families amid secrets that run as deep and dark as the coal mines.Between the years 1916 and 1969, Alta Krol and Myrthen Bergmann encounter each other only a few times. Little do they realize their lives are as intertwined as a wreath made from the thin branches of a myrtle tree. Alta is driven by artistic passion, her love for Myrthen's husband and a dream to flee the hills of Appalachia. "She'd never been to Florida, or anywhere but where she was right then, in a lackluster coal-mining town with mountains like arms around her, always squeezing. Every day of all of her thirty-eight years had been spent in a town that, at its greatest density, contained only a little more than seven thousand people." Religious fervor, a desire to extricate herself from her loveless marriage and a maniacal ambition to become a nun drive Myrthen. "It seemed Heaven was the only place she might find love; none of her relationships with the living had turned out particularly well." A devastating mine explosion buries their sins and the burdens of their shame, until many years later, when the 3-year-old town prophet, Gabriel, unearths them, providing both Alta and Myrthen, at long last, reckoning and redemption. Cander (11 Stories, 2013, etc.) divinely delves into multiple points of view, crafting a collage of vibrant, layered characters while charting six decades of poignant, precise moments. A distinctive novel that sublimely measures the distressed though determined heartbeat of a small mountain community.

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February 15, 2015
Cander's fourth novel, following her award-winning 11 Stories (2013), spans 53 years and highlights key personal events in the lives of residents in a West Virginia mining town. When a six-year-old girl dies in a mishap, her twin sister, Mythren, turns repressed guilt into religious zeal that poisons her life and those of other townspeople. Years later, Alta Krol becomes unknowingly bound to Mythren by virtue of loving the man Mythren marries, and by entering her own ill-fated marriage at the same church, on the same day. Yet Alta's tale is one of triumpha life of familial devotion and feminine strength that is reflected in a young woman named Lidia, with whom she forms a profound friendship years later. Cander superbly envisions the town, its residents' dynamics, and the early twentieth-century immigrant experience. Although Mythren's narrative turns a bit too gothic, Cander rewards the reader with Alta and Lidia, well-developed, believable characters whose mental fortitude and capacity to love linger in the reader's mind long after the last page.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)